DAVID ALLINSONVolume 8, Issue 1Hey guys, the Reasonable Man here. Just thought I’d write in to keep you up-to-date with what I got up to in the Common Law this week.

On Monday, in LM v K Lawyers, I decided it would be a good idea to bill a client 24.8 hours of work for a single day. C’est très drole, you say? On the contrary, I was really fucking busy. Working so fast you bend time is no laughing matter.

I also decided it was totally normal to charge someone $270 to print two letters. Who wants to do that shit? Not this reasonable man, and don’t forget I had ­ –.08 hours this week to hire a clerk to do it for me. See? Totally normal levels of reasonableness.

Occasionally one is just so busy being an important lawyerly reasonable man that one simply doesn’t want to walk places. Reasonable? Totally. And why shouldn’t I charge someone for waiting around? My daily schedules are, after all, existential proofs of Einstein’s theory of relativity. So, combine those two principles of reasonableness par excellence, and I think it evinced a totally normal exercise of discretion to charge $378 for catching a taxi to a J.P. with an affidavit, and waiting while they sign it.

We have to accept that the ‘reasonable man’ is not just some fictitious entity, reflective of accepted community values. We have to accept that the Reasonable Man is an actual person. This week, as always, that actual person was me: the same person who charged a client $81 for Googling the terms ‘Justice of Peace+Ballajura’. The Honourable Registrar Boyle said this wasn’t ‘a proper charge’. He obviously had time in his schedule to update his Firefox browser this week, and we just don’t all have that luxury.